Someone was born
around the same time as me.
He rode a tricycle down the
glittering sidewalk in the sun.

He was oblivious of me
and that I, a few years older,
was teetering warily
on my first bicycle,
trying not to run into
the neighbor’s hedges.

A split screen like they have
on t.v. shows might have shown
each of us enjoying the same
breakfast cereal, barricading ourselves
behind cardboard boxes
and staring at the cartoon maze
on the back, following the path
with our eyes because
we were busy holding spoons
instead of pencils.

He moved around with his family,
while mine stayed put
in the same house; but without
knowing the other existed,
we both felt a certain loneliness,
even among friends.

And could we have made
magic spyglasses to traverse
with our eyes the thousands
of miles between us,
we might have drawn
some solidarity together.
We might have found
each other somehow.

But for a few decades passed
and a wagon full of loss, luck
and other curiosities, we are
the same people that we were
as children.

Only now we each sit
in our respective homes,
established with all of the
requisite trappings of
adulthood, still having never
laid eyes on each other.

And were it possible
to craft those spyglasses
out of cardboard and glitter
and aging hopes, would we
choose to peer across the world
for the one whose path never
intersected our own,
in whose communion we
might have found what we needed?

At least we might have diverted
the particular misfortunes that dog us
when we close our eyes
and try to remember if we ever knew
that our whole life was ahead of us,
when it truly was, or if we were too busy
just trying to get down the sidewalk.